“What do you want the nineteen cents for?” asked the other.
“To buy a certain kind of ruler I need for drawing my plans.”
“If you’ve figured it out as closely as all that,” replied the lawyer, “I’ll take a chance and lend you the money.”
He did so, receiving in exchange a large block of stock in the new-formed Holland Torpedo-boat Company. To-day his stock is worth several million dollars.
Mr. Holland won the competition and after two years’ delay his company began the construction of the Plunger. This submarine was to be propelled by steam while running on the surface and by storage-batteries when submerged. Double propulsion of this type had been first installed by a Southerner named Alstitt on a submarine he built at Mobile, Alabama, in 1863, and theoretically discussed in a book written in 1887 by Commander Hovgaard of the Danish navy. Though a great improvement on any type of single propulsion, this system had many drawbacks, the chief of which was the length of time—from fifteen to thirty minutes—that it took for the oil-burning surface engine to cool and rid itself of hot gases before it was safe to seal the funnel and dive. Though the Plunger was launched in 1897, she was never finished, for Mr. Holland foresaw her defects. He persuaded the Government to let his company pay back the money already spent on the Plunger and build an entirely new boat.
Holland No. 8 was built accordingly, but failed to work properly. Finally came the ninth and last of her line, the first of the modern submarines, the world-famous Holland.
She was a chunky little porpoise of a boat, 10 feet 7 inches deep and only 53 feet 10 inches long, and looking even shorter and thicker than she was because of the narrow, comb-like superstructure running fore and aft along the deck. But her shape and dimensions were the results of twenty-five years’ experience. Built at Mr. Lewis Nixon’s shipyards at Elizabethport, New Jersey, the Holland was launched in the early spring of 1898, between the blowing-up of the Maine and the outbreak of the Spanish-American War. But though John P. Holland repeatedly begged to be allowed to take his submarine into Santiago Harbor and torpedo Cervera’s fleet, the naval authorities at Washington were too conservative-minded to let him try.
“United States warship goes down with all hands!” the small boys (I was one of them) used to shout at this time, and then explain that it was only another dive of the “Holland submarine.” Strictly speaking, the Holland was not a United States warship till October 13, 1900, when she was formally placed in commission under the command of Lieutenant Harry H. Caldwell, who had been on her during many of the exhaustive series of trials in which the little undersea destroyer proved to even the most conservative officers of our navy that the day of the submarine had come at last.
Courtesy of the Electric Boat Company